woensdag, augustus 19, 2015

This rather blurry and imprecise photograph, taken by Ise Gropius in 1926, became one of the most iconic images of the House Gropius after the building’s destruction in 1945, creating our collective memory of it. (foto: Ise Gropius)

And today... the ghost of House Gropius, replacing House Emmer, demolished in 2008, following discussions about what to preserve, to reconstruct or to destroy... (foto: Christoph Rokitta)

"On 7 March 1945, most of Dessau’s inner city was destroyed by an air raid. Gropius’ villa and the neighbouring home of the Moholy-Nagys were severely damaged, and while House Moholy-Nagy (actually half a house) was torn down completely, the basement of the Gropius House survived. After the War, there was little interest in Dessau, by then a city in Eastern Germany, to reestablish the Bauhaus. And in the 1950s, when a couple wanted to build their new home on Gropius’ foundations, planning officials allowed it, and even insisted on the house having a pitched roof – as if to provoke the original architect, who in the meantime had become a US citizen. The new House Emmer was the result, named after the couple who built it, blending well with the older houses on the other side of the street, but contrasting starkly with the remaining Masters’ Houses, which fell into disrepair during the following decades. Their renovation and reuse as exhibition spaces started only after 1992."

Set on the foundations of House Gropius, House Emmer was built in the 1950s. With its pitched roof it made a perfect anti-Bauhaus-statement, 2006. (foto: Silvia Höll)

"In the course of the reappraisal of the Bauhaus’ heritage in Dessau, intense discussions on the lost one-and-a-half Masters’ Houses suddenly exploded. Should they be reconstructed as if nothing had happened? Or should the House Emmer be torn down, the one actual surviving witness to all the layers of German history that had impacted on the site? This discussion linked directly to those going on in cities all over Germany, some of which continue, on the reconstruction of houses, squares and entire inner cities as copies of images of how they were before the Second World War: the Frauenkirche in Dresden, the Stadtschlösser or City Palaces in Berlin and Potsdam, or the medieval housing quarter in the centre of Frankfurt being cases in point.

But hardly ever has a building of classic modernism been the target of such a reconstruction – on the contrary, in many German cities it is the modern buildings that are being torn down to make place for more “historic” ones. Yet in Dessau, the case was even more complicated. If you want to restore something from the past, which period exactly do you pick? Which past do you want to revive? To reconstruct the missing houses would mean giving back the ensemble its missing parts, restoring it to its former glory as a perfect showcase of internationally renowned early modernism. Yet it would also mean destroying the traces of German history that followed this brief period, the traces that Nazi Germany and the GDR left on the site, the first with it’s opposition to, the second with its utter disinterest in, the intentions behind the modernist architecture defined by the Bauhaus.

An initial architecture competition was held and ended without satisfying result, fuelling the discussions even more. The question arose if perhaps there was a third way between keeping the contradictory elements of the site as witness to a contradictory past, or reconstructing Gropius’ original as if nothing had happened.

In a new competition, it were Berlin-based Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects who came up with a convincing, yet heavily theoretical, scheme that answered this question. Their almost philosophical concept referred to the work of artists and writers like Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Jorge Luis Borges, with their ideas cuing off themes of human memory and imagination: “Our memory lives off blurriness and imprecision”, said architect José Gutierrez Marquez at the opening in Dessau.

Their winning scheme, now completed but not yet fitted out, is an experiment questioning what a reconstruction is or could be. Coming from this idea of the blurriness of memory, and the imprecision of old black and white photographs, they’ve created an architecture that evokes questions rather than delivers specific answers as to what House Gropius or Moholy-Nagy actually looked like.
....
Most details of the buildings were omitted – such as the metal handrails to the balconies – turning the buildings into grey sculptures, almost lacking any scale. This idea of constructive subtraction continues inside, where several walls and ceilings of the original were partially removed, create surprising internal configurations: the original interior lay outs cut wide open, with odd windows hanging in the air indicating where the original rooms and walls once were."

The new House Gropius, designed by Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects, is built on the basement of the original, the only part to survive the bombings in WW2. (foto's: Christoph Rokitta)

The new House Moholy-Nagy follows exactly the cubic composition of the original, yet it omits many details, creating a scale-less, sculpture-like exterior, a treatment which continues inside, where specific walls and ceilings of the historic interior were edited out of the new building. (foto's: Christoph Rokitta)

"By managing to turn their ideas of blurriness and imprecision into well-detailed three-dimensional buildings, that need to be per se sharp and precise, the architects have managed with this design to avoid creating anything like an idyllic recreation of the Bauhaus’ perfect modernist world. This is no Disneyfied Gropius, at the same time it is no memorial trying to conserve or rehash the spasms of the 20th century. The Bauhaus’ architecture was a provocation in its time – and the new Gropius House is again thought provoking, being a reinterpretation rather than a reconstruction.

It is, most of all, a highly controversial piece of architecture, that hopefully will keep the controversies of early modernism, German history, and the Bauhaus itself, alive. Even after the opening ceremony for the buildings last week, a small controversy erupted over the reconstructed wall around Gropius’ garden, with local Dessau residents complaining: “We don’t need a wall”.

And nothing could maintain the heritage of the Bauhaus better than an ongoing controversy." (tekst: Florian Heilmeyer, bron: uncube)

"In 1925, the city of Dessau also commissioned Walter Gropius with the construction of three semidetached houses for the Bauhaus masters and a detached house for its director. The plot lies in a small pine-tree wood where Ebertallee stands today – one of the axes of the Dessau Wörlitz Garden Realm between the Seven Pillars of the Georgium and Amaliensitz. In 1926, Gropius and the Bauhaus masters László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer as well as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were able to move in with their families.

With this ensemble of buildings, Gropius aimed, using industrially prefabricated and simple “building block” construction elements, to put the principles of efficient construction into practice – both in relation to the architecture and the building process itself. The standardisation of construction elements was, however, in view of the technical resources available at the time, only partially realised.

The houses acquired their form through interleaved cubic corpora of different heights. Vertical rows of windows on the side façades provide lighting for the stairways, while the view of the semidetached houses from the street is characterised by the large glass windows of the studios. The façade of the Director’s House was the only one to feature asymmetrically arranged windows. The sides facing away from the street have generous terraces and balconies. The houses are painted in light tones and the window frames, the undersides of balconies and down pipes in stronger colours.

The semidetached houses are essentially all the same: Each half of the house shares the same floor plan, albeit mirrored and rotated by 90°. Only on the second floor do the halves of the houses differ – the western section always features two additional rooms.

All the houses were equipped with modern furniture, and fitted cupboards were integrated between the kitchen service area and the dining room and between the bedroom and the studio. While Gropius and Moholy-Nagy fitted their houses exclusively with furniture by Marcel Breuer, the other masters brought their own furniture with them. The artists also developed their own ideas with respect to the arrangement of colour, which, with Klee and Kandinsky, for example, was closely related to their own artistic work." (bron: Bauhaus Dessau)

House Moholy-Nagy

House Moholy-Nagy from the east, 1926. (foto: Lucia Moholy)

Living room in House Moholy-Nagy, 1926. (foto: Lucia Moholy)

"Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife, Lucia Moholy lived in the first half of the semi-detached pair. It was both spatially and conceptually close to the Gropius House. Gropius and his "Minister President" Moholy-Nagy - so Oskar Schlemmer poked fun at the time - steered the new course at the Bauhaus. Thus the arrangements of this apartment agreed to the fullest extent with the interior decoration intentions of Gropius himself. Moholy-Nagy and his wife left house number 2 in June 1928. Josef Albers and his wife, Anni, were the next tenants."

House Feininger

House Feininger, 1993. (foto: Heinz Ambrosus)

House Feininger, living room.

"Lyonel Feininger together with his wife, Julia, and their sons, Andreas, Laurence and Theodor Lux, lived in the next half of the semi-detached pair. He soon gave up his reservations concerning the architecture when he realised how wonderful not only the cupboards were (built in the Bauhaus following designs of Andreas Feininger) but also how it allowed the placement of the 19th century furniture. Feininger's sons each occupied one of the two first floor rooms and possibly one of the rooms beneath. Laurence later became a composer and music historian. Andreas, the eldest son, studied in the Bauhaus in Weimar and in 1927 took up architectural studies in Zerbst. Theodor Lux began his studies at the Bauhaus in the year they moved in. He was, inter alia, a member of the stage workshop and the Bauhaus band. Fascinated by the photographic experiments of his neighbour Moholy-Nagy he took up photography in 1927. Apparently Theodor Lux's photographic interest spilled over to his brother Andreas who started on a photographic career. Theodor Lux turned his talents to painting in 1929. Like in Feininger's atelier, within a few years first class works of painting and graphics appeared from the other Masters' Houses too."

House Muche

House Muche, east side 2002. (foto: Wolfgang Thöner)

House Muche, 1999. (foto: Helbig)

House Muche, living room. (foto: Consemüller)

House Muche, entrance, 1998. (foto: Pollmeyer)

"Georg and El Muche and Oskar and Tut Schlemmer lived in the next semi-detached house. A picture of the interior décor of the Muche House made it into Gropius' famous Bauhaus Buildings Book as the couple remained faithful to the Bauhaus line in the sitting room fittings. It included only furniture from Marcel Breuer and paintings from Muche.In 1927 the Muche House saw the first tenant change of the estate as Georg and El Muche left the Bauhaus and Hinnerk and Lou Scheper moved in. The leaving party for Georg and El Muche took place on the 2 July 1927 in the, now, Scheper House. The first "junior master" on the estate lived with Hinnerk Scheper and his family."

House Schlemmer

House Muche / Schlemmer, northwest side 2002. (foto: Wolfgang Thöner)

House Muche / Schlemmer, entrance 2002. (foto: Wolfgang Thöner)

"Oskar Schlemmer lived with his wife and three children in the neighbouring house. The Schlemmer's enjoyed a very lively family life in which their three children Tilman, Jaina and Karin played a prominent role. Since the Schlemmers had lived for some time in Tessin, Hannes Meyer, the architecture teacher moved into the house too. The Schlemmer family left their domicile in 1929 when Oskar Schlemmer was appointed to Breslau. Alfred Arndt the head of the Bauhaus interior design workshop, together with his wife the Bauhaus weaver, Gertrud Arndt, next moved in. The head of the weaving shop Gunta Stölzl and her child occupied the atelier and an adjoining room in the former Schlemmer House from November 1929 to July 1930. From 1930 on she was sometimes there with her husband, Arieh Sharon, who also worked at the Bauhaus."

"Despite their reservations concerning the architecture Wassily and Nina Kandinsky were happy with the new quality of the Masters' Houses: "We couldn't invite many people in Weimar because the flat was too small. Dessau changed that. Now, at last, we can ask our countless friends and acquaintances to visit us. Twice a year we let loose in our house: for New Year's Eve we invited the Klee, Grote and Albers families. Muche and his wife were also on the guest list." The semi-detached houses of Kandinsky and Klee with their colourful internal decor and fittings made a complete contrast to the Gropius architecture. Kandinsky's finished colour designs for the living room, his atelier and other rooms clearly show that he was interested in autonomous artistic spaces. The living room was furnished with older pieces that did not, for example, stem from the Bauhaus. The niche with its golden colour - arranged with sofa, carpet and painting - was a production of a very special type of space.The Kandinskys felt so at home in Dessau that they took out naturalisation papers. On 8 March 1928 Wassily and Nina Kandinsky received their German passports that finally gave them the chance to travel even outside Germany."

"Paul Klee lived in the last Masters' Houses with his wife, Lily, and their son Felix for whom he had arranged an apprenticeship at the Dessau theatre. Beside the maid, the gymnastics teacher at the Bauhaus, Karla Grosch, also belonged to the household. This latter was a pupil of the Palucca School and was described by Ludwig Grote, the State Curator of Anhalt, as a "powerful, jaunty personality of fair-haired freshness". Paul Klee, a cat lover, was a knowledgeable musician, and talented violinist. He often played music with his wife and also in a quartet with musicians from Dessau's theatre orchestra. The feature of the neighbourliness between Kandinsky and Klee lay in their close friendship. Their artistic work and their lessons in the Bauhaus indicate that they had many things in common in their time in Dessau. In opposition to the cool clean colours in the Kandinsky House Paul Klee decided for a warmer "earthier" atmosphere in his atelier and living room." (bron: Dessau Meisterhäuser)